VMware has taken Carpathia Hosting, which has a lot of experience in providing IT services to the US federal government, as partner in pursuit of an authorization to provide hybrid cloud services to government agencies.

The Palo Alto, California-based vendor announced Tuesday that it was pursuing FedRAMP authorization together with Carpathia. The authorization is a government stamp of approval that certifies that a company is fit to provide cloud services to federal agencies.

There are 11 companies and one government department on the list of FedRAMP-authorized service providers. VMware and Carpathia will be competing for government cloud business with the likes of HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon Web Services, AT&T, Lockheed Martin and CGI Federal, all of whom have the authorization.

The reason VMware teamed up with Carpathia instead of going for the authorization on its own is the partner's experience in the federal space. Mathew Lodge, the company's VP of cloud services, told GigaOm the advantage of partnering with Carpathia was that the service provider had gone through similar authorization processes before.

VMware has designed a special flavor of its hybrid cloud service vCloud called vCloud Government Service. Carpathia will act as the provider, using VMware's technology.

The promise of vCloud is easy integration of on-premise virtualized infrastructure (using VMware vSphere) with off-premise cloud resources. The company says users will be able to extend their environments to the cloud, replicating their existing networking environments seamlessly.

Federal departments and agencies have been under pressure to use cloud-based services and consolidate IT infrastructure and data centers since 2010.